SAMSON, Ala. – The gunman who killed 10 people and committed suicide in a rampage across the Alabama countryside had struggled to keep a job and left behind a list of employers and co-workers he believed had wronged him, authorities said yesterday.

The list, found in his home, included a metals plant that had forced Michael McLendon to resign years ago. Also on the list was a sausage factory where he suddenly quit last week and a poultry plant that suspended his mother, District Attorney Gary McAliley said.

Federal court records show McLendon and his mother, Lisa McLendon, are among employees who are suing the Pilgrim's Pride company over compensation claims from 2006. Authorities said the company was on a list of those he felt had harmed him.

McAliley was quoted as telling The Dothan Eagle that McLendon also listed people at the Kelley Foods sausage factory who had complained about McLendon for such things as not wearing earplugs and slicing the meat too thin.

“We found a list of people he worked with, people who had done him wrong,” the district attorney said outside the charred house where the rampage began.

But investigators offered no immediate explanation for why McLendon targeted relatives and other people who weren't on the list as he fired more than 200 rounds in a roughly 20-mile trail of carnage across two counties near the Florida state line Tuesday.

In the span of about an hour, McLendon, 28, set fire to the home he shared with his mother and killed three dogs there, shot and killed five relatives and five bystanders and committed suicide in a standoff at the metals plant. At his house, he put his mother's body on the sofa, draped one of the dogs across her face, and put the other two across her feet.

“The community's just in disbelief, just how this could happen in our small town,” said state Sen. Harri Anne Smith, from the nearby town of Slocomb. “This was 20-something miles of terror.”

It wasn't clear how long McLendon had been planning the attack, but authorities said he armed himself with four guns – two assault rifles with high-capacity magazines taped together, a shotgun and a .38-caliber pistol – and may have planned a bigger massacre than he had time to carry out.

“I'm convinced he went over there to kill more people. He was heavily armed,” said Sheriff Dave Sutton.

The shooting was the deadliest attack by a single gunman in Alabama history, and plunged Samson, the community of about 2,000 where McLendon grew up and where most of his victims lived, into mourning.

The town is so close-knit that the mayor had coached McLendon in T-ball when he was a boy, and the dead included the wife and 18-month-old daughter of one of the sheriff's deputies sent to chase McLendon.

As word about the killings spread, graduates of the local high school scrambled to find their yearbooks, and many realized they knew the gunman.

“Something had to snap,” said Jerry Hysmith, 35, who worked with McLendon at the metals plant in 2001.